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David Barton and Maurice Halbwachs; Or, Another Blog Post about Barton (and a Call for More)

Charlie McCrary

David Barton is like “Party in the U.S.A.”Despite my scrupulous efforts to avoid them
at all cost, one little hook—be it that opening guitar line of the inane Miley Cyrus hit or
a classic Barton line
about Founders’ “seminary or ‘Bible school’” training— sets the whole tune
rattling around my unwilling skull for days.Barton’s latest book, The Jefferson Lies, has led to a
flurry of responses: huge sales, point-by-point refutations, a recall by its
publisher, and a number of excellent blog
postsand
articles.But I try not to read them.Why spend my time on this?I have a thesis to write.I want to talk about something “serious.”

But David Barton is serious.His books have sold millions; his ideas influence education policy;
his supporters include members
of Congress.While I am glad that
others have taken up the task of refuting Barton’s ideas on historical grounds,
there is further inquiry to be done.What
interests me is not so much the content of Barton’s work but its context.Barton may have failed to historicize Thomas
Jefferson, but scholars of American religions should not fail to historicize and
theorize Barton and his audience.What
are the epistemological systems—and the history of those systems—that undergird
Barton-devotees’ allegiances?How does
Barton fit in the context of the Religious Right?What about Common Sense Realism?What about the history of American
education?Which theorists can help us
understand Barton and his audience?Questions
like these, and the complexity of their answers, are what keep me coming back
to Barton, besting my efforts to ignore him: “Ok, one more YouTube clip, then back
to work.Just one more
article.Ok, now I’ll write one.”

David Barton most recently imposed himself upon my brain as
I was reading Maurice Halbwachs’s On Collective Memory.Though published nearly a century ago,
Halbwachs’s work is remarkably useful, and it holds up well in light of later
theorists and new understandings of human psychology.In On
Collective Memory, Halbwachs demonstrates the ways that community identity,
informing and informed by individuals’ self-understanding, relies on
reconstructions of the past.Those
reconstructions, though, are never exact, as they are inevitably influenced, on
a cultural as well as psychological level, by present circumstances.In short, for Halbwachs, memories work within
“social frameworks.”These frameworks
help determine collective and individual behaviors, including memories but also
feelings and emotional expression, religious beliefs, and systems for
evaluating truth.So, taking our lead
from Halbwachs, we can ask—by what social frameworks do Barton’s devotees
evaluate knowledge?Halbwachs offers
some general theoretical guidance, which can be added to historically-based
analysis, to this question.

Some popular recentbooks have argued that, on a
psychological level, the “conservative” mind and “liberal” mind are different.Halbwachs would probably agree with this,
though he would emphasize that these mindsets are reinforced, if not created,
by one’s family, religious community, class, and locality.For these reasons, though I am grateful for
the work to refute Barton, I think that much of it will miss its mark.It is never about history with Barton, at
least not in the way historians understand “history.”Thus, to engage with him in historical
debates does not really work.For
Barton, it’s about the present.Barton
peddles not in history but in collective memory.What Halbwachs says about family stories can
apply also to Barton’s mythologies: These stories are not (just) narrations of
fact; they “are at the same time models, examples, and elements of
teaching.They express the general
attitude of the group; they not only reproduce its history but also define its
nature and its qualities and weaknesses” (59).

Halbwachs’s analysis of family mythology can, I think, be reasonably
and fruitfully extended to American subcultures today.Halbwachs singled out family stories for
their extreme locality.However,
American culture, though less split along regional lines, is still very highly
fragmented.Substitute “subculture”
for “family” in the following passage from On
Collective Memory: “Each family ends up with its own logic and traditions,
which resemble those of the general society in that they derive from it and
continue to regulate the family’s relations with general society.But this logic and these traditions are
nevertheless distinct because they are little by little pervaded by the
family’s particular experiences and because their role is increasingly to
insure the family’s cohesion and to guarantee its continuity” (83).

Barton draws on the logic and traditions of the “general society”
by talking about the Constitution, emphasizing the Founding Fathers, etc.Barton wrote about Jefferson because
Americans, writ large, think Jefferson is important.However, Barton’s (and, of course, his
audience’s) traditions and even his very logicis influenced by the logic and tradition not only of “general
society” but also of a conservative evangelical subculture.For instance, there seems to be a clear
connection between Barton’s shunning of secondary sources and relentlessly
textual approach that rings true to conservative evangelicals.It’s not too much of a stretch to say that
Barton’s approach must feel familiar—and true—to those whose biblical
hermeneutics are ahistorical, textual, and presentist.

So, there is my brief Halbwachsian take. But there is still
much more analysis undone, articles to be written, and RSS feeds to fill.Let us press on through our Barton fatigue!It is in this spirit that I now pass the
baton to you, dear reader.Since we
can’t stop talking about him—and I don’t really see why we should—what are some
other ways, historical and/or theoretical, to talk about David Barton?

Comments

Thanks for this post, Charlie. I think you're right that the more interesting questions about Barton are really about his audience. Barton is a branded authority now and would/will be a significant loss to the cause, but he didn't start the Christian America crusade (the NCC adopted as its first slogan in 1950, "the building of a Christian America in a Christian world") and he can be replaced. More remarkable is the continuation of the "secular humanist" conspiracy-thought that undergirds Barton's enterprise. And this despite a fairly fluid conservative evangelical subculture (notably, the numbers of young people who leave the movement when they leave home for college). On the other hand, isn't Barton all of a piece with Tom Hayden, Hitler, and Teddy Roosevelt? Meaning, he and other religious right leaders manipulate conspiratorial tendencies for the sake of political mobilization. Don't all movements do this? Thus, today's "godless liberals" are yesterday's "the Man," the "Jews," and "the Trusts."

Charlie, this post is full of excellent insights. I've been working on an article on Barton's role in the Texas social studies debacle that does some of this sort of thing, but from a different angle and without as much attention to theory. I'd really encourage you to develop these thoughts further and publish them in a journal article. You're right on target, in my opinion. Great stuff.--Mark Chancey, SMU

Mark E.- I think it would be very interesting to see a longer history of the "Christian America" idea itself and how it pops up in response to various "threats."

Mark C.- Thanks for the kind words. I'd really like to see your article when it's done. My parents recently moved to Texas and I like to joke that they placed my sister in a Presbyterian school because the public schools are too religious.

Without David Barton's [and the late Rev. Peter Marshall's] political agitation, Daniel Dreisbach [JD Virginia, DPhil Oxford] never would have been the 3rd conservative member of the Texas curriculum review board.

The interesting part of the Great Texas Schoolbook Massacre was the left-leaning state of the curriculum before the "Bartonites" weighed in. I have never seen a report on it---interest ended when the circus part, the hearings, ended. [Neither was the "Texas Freedom Network," the blogosphere's favorite source, remotely an unbiased reporter.]

http://www.tea.state.tx.us/index2.aspx?id=3643

Here are the final revisions, showing not only what was added but what was struck out. I have not run across an honest accounting of what was finally approved, just caricatures of the goofier proposals. There was a conscious shift from ethnic studies to citizenship, from anthropology to history. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and neither was the previous curriculum itself above valid criticism if not risibility.

As for David Barton, few of the major Barton critics has ever given him credit over the years for the parts he gets right---which for the sake of argument, we will call the parts he borrowed from Daniel Dreisbach.

Like the recent Dr. Niall Ferguson kerfuffle [Newsweek's "Hit the Road, Barack"], the opponents did not merely disagree or debate, their ambition for years has been to discredit and destroy, to scorch his earth.

This has never been about history or accuracy. It is bare-knuckle politics. It's not about Barton's book, it's about Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947), where Justice Hugo Black's opinion elevated Jefferson's passing remark of "wall between church and state" to an arguably draconian law of the land, from accommodation to strict separationism.

http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/lpbr/subpages/reviews/Dreisbach104.htm

With his contentious reading of factoids, Barton was easy to score cheap points on and proclaim victory. If you remember the end of "Face in the Crowd," he'll still make a living at this, but it won't be the same. But this is more the end of the beginning, I think. Anti-anti-revisionism like his isn't going away.